What Is Messianic Judaism? Jewish Presence in Christ’s Body

For nearly two thousand years, devotion to the God of Israel has unfolded along two largely diverging paths that we now recognize as the religions of Judaism and Christianity. Yet this separation too easily obscures the historical reality that the earliest followers of Jesus the Jew were themselves Jews. The first believers worshiped the God of Israel, read the Hebrew Scriptures, and proclaimed that the long-awaited Jewish Messiah had come. The notion that allegiance to this Messiah would eventually produce a new religion estranged from the very people and covenant that nurtured it would have seemed almost unthinkable to them. The unfolding history tells a complicated story. From the earliest disputes within the synagogue (Acts 15) to the destruction of the temple (AD 70), the dispersion of the Jewish people, the rise of imperial Christianity, and centuries of theological polemics and institutional divisions, Jewish presence and allegiance to Jesus gradually disconnected. Over time, the relationship between Jewish identity and faith in Jesus came to be portrayed as mutually exclusive, as though Jewishness and “Jesus-faith” could not co-exist. Nothing could be further from the truth...